Ignorant of the Past & Fearful of the Future

by Evan Graber

When I say that I see a church that is ignorant of its past and woeful about the future, I mean that the church has forgotten who it was and forgotten who God promised she would be.

We have become so consumed with discovering who we are and determining who we will be in a contemporary culture and context that we have forgotten who the church has been. We have forgotten the faithfulness of the church that was necessary for the gospel to be preserved and proclaimed to us today. We have forgotten the countless people who have given their lives to the gospel in their living and in their dying.

As tragic as this amnesia is, it does not compare to our sin of forgetting that God has been faithful in this same church through the centuries. When we forget God’s faithfulness in the past, we will doubt him in the future. As Christians we live our lives of faith suspended between our memory of God’s faithfulness and our hope in his promise. It is no great surprise that a church without a history and tradition fears her future.

Our world is full of woe. The church should be full of hope, full of the hope of Christ. We should not give into fears about the future. Fear of the future is rooted in uncertainty. Do not listen to the tale-spinners and the fortunetellers. Do not buy their best guesses about what it to come. We cannot be certain of the how and when. We can only be certain of Christ. He is our future, and he is certain. “With him on my side I am fearless, afraid of nothing and no one.”